Preparing Your Feats, Adventurer Art

I'm still working on spells! As it turns out, some of the weirder, high-level vancian spells have to be warped a lot when converting them to at-will abilities with boosted effects. I have about ten more spells to build for the playtest document, then I check over the Equipment and Magic Items chapters, then we should be good to go.

In the meantime, here's part of the intro to the Feats chapter, which explains how you decide which of your feats you have access to each day, how you can leave "slots" open for later preparation (similar to spell slots in 3E), and how you can use boosts to immediately prepare an unprepared feat so you can use it in an emergency.

Preparing Feats

Eventually (after you’ve gained a few levels), you’ll learn so many feats that it’ll be too much to keep in your head all at once. Preparing is like studying before a big test, or warming up before a sports game—you’re refreshing your mind and body about things you already know, focusing on what you think you’ll need to know that day, and ignoring the stuff that you don’t think you’ll need that day.

You can prepare your feats after resting for 4 or more hours. Normally you prepare after you’ve rested for the night (a full 8 hours).

Once you prepare your feats, they stay prepared until you decide to change them after resting. (In other words, if you forget to say what feats you prepared today, just use the ones you prepared the last time.)

If you don’t prepare a feat that day, you don’t get any of that feat’s benefits. For example, if you’re a wizard who learned Leather Armor Training (so you can wear leather armor instead of just cloth armor), if you don’t prepare Leather Armor Training, you can’t wear leather armor that day. Not preparing a feat is a lot like not knowing that feat at all—if you don’t prepare it, it does nothing for you.

The number of feats you can have prepared at once is equal to your level + 5. This number is how many "feat slots" you have. When you prepare your feats, you don’t have to “fill” all of your feat slots right away—you can leave some slots open, and use the Slow Preparation Rule or the Fast Preparation Rule to prepare them later.

The Slow Preparation Rule: You can spend 1 hour resting to “fill” one open feat slot with a feat you know. Until the next time you rest to prepare feats, you can use this feat as if you had prepared it right after resting.

The Fast Preparation Rule: You can spend a boost to “fill” one open feat slot with a feat you know. Until the next time you rest to prepare feats, you can use this feat as if you had prepared it right after resting. Spending a boost to do this doesn’t count toward the normal limit of one boost per round.

Comments

Ya know, its crazy, it's only been 9 days since this update, but it feels longer than that. Any changes to how going to be handling the Playtest? Regardless I eagerly await the next update.

When you rest for an hour, can you also gain back a Boost, in addition to filling a feat slot? Or is it moreso must choose a specific one, and intent is to force players to split between various resources systems to ideally keep the "X min workday" in check?

Superbacker

Thanks for the update. The feat preparation thing was one of the concepts that first got me interested in the ideas going into this game, so it's nice to hear it in more detail.

I also can't wait to see how you handle magic, especially if you plan on making them all at-will abilities while still trying to emulate those more powerful ones. One of the things I thought 4e did well was simplifying magic-user's huge lists of spells into what it became in that game, and using at-will, encounter, and daily abilities to cut down on tracking how many more times I can cast fireball today. I think I would have liked it even more if they hadn't made every other class work the same way, but hey, it was a neat idea.

Awesome! Hopefully Equipment can be useful longer than just low levels, but perhaps can be something to expand on later. Magic Items, I do hope are exciting more in vein I've heard w/2e's, opposed to jumble of minor stuff like 3e's MIC.

{The number of feats you can have prepared at once is equal to your level + 5. }
I'm not sure what the rate of Feats will be, but I wonder how much that limit will actually get exceeded (30 feats usable at once at 25th level?!). Also, I'm guessing the reason for seemingly large ready limit, is for alleviation of any feat chains, such as for Armor? Is there going to be Feat Chains actually?

As for the Adventurer Art, it looks pretty good, I'd definitely enjoy a Chest-backpack (I really like Backpacks-like appearance on characters in general).